OUR MOST DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT:

The exhibition turns one of the oldest conventions of portraiture on its head. For centuries, rulers commissioned portraits from the lowly. The sitter is the one with power, while the portraitist aims to convey the patron's invisible qualities: authority, wisdom, magnanimity. In this exhibition, however, the artist--once the most powerful man in the world--is trying to 

Bush accomplishes this by building a terrain of extremely thick layers of oil paint on the canvas or board. Doing so can lend either reality or surreality to the portraits, as scars are made palpable; facial folds are deepened; and the normally invisible injuries of guilt, depression and post-traumatic stress are inscribed on surfaces.

Lt. Col. David Haines appears as a fleshy, disembodied face that nearly fills the frame and merges with the turquoise background. Haines's eye sockets are deep--because Bush has dug them out and piled lighter shades around them. Thick waves and globs of paint cover his forehead, perhaps signaling an inner struggle.

One of the most affecting pieces, though, is one of the least textured. Petty Officer Chris Goehner, who worked with a medical trauma unit in Iraq, is painted entirely in red. Different tones and values rather than heaps of paint indicate the furrows in his brow and the terrified vulnerability of a man who suffered nightmares for years.

First Sergeant Robert Ferrara, who served a 23-year career in the Army, said in a recent interview in the exhibition gallery that Bush "captured everything about the way I was back then," before Ferrara began to heal from depression and survivor's guilt. Ferrara looks emotionally shattered in his portrait, which is incorporated into a triptych featuring dozens of service members in uniform. He stares into the far distance but seems to shrink from something nearby.

Ferrara never sat for a portrait--Bush works largely from photographs. He got to know the president through veterans' events at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. Ferrara credits those programs with helping him to heal. At the exhibition, his wife Melissa compared him to the painting and said, "Look how far you've come."

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